N.A.C.L. - Samuel Thomas Martin’s “Resettlement”
Shortlisted for Salty Ink’s 2010 Short Fiction contest
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“Resettlement”
I remember thinking Liz was a rapist on top of me that night. Her hands all over. But it was her shaking that jolted me from nightmare to the choking smoke and her hoarse screaming that the building was on fire.
Come on, Natalie! We gotta get out!
Wha—
Fire! The building’s on fire!
And I could smell it then, acrid and thick, like vomit on a hot sidewalk—the smoke making the dark room darker and my sleep haze like fog. It’s the thick Quidi Vidi fog that makes me recall that night in Toronto when my tenement building burned. The pea soup fog makes it so I can’t see out the Gut to the sea, knowing the cliffs jut up in front of me across the water, though hidden from view. I wouldn’t even know it was the sea in front of me if I opened my eyes and this was my dream and Toronto my reality, because I haven’t been able to smell a blessed thing since that night, nor taste anything besides.
I stand alone in the wet grey, sometimes hearing the waves and the suck and scroll of stones on stones, sometimes hearing nothing at all. Sometimes hearing Liz’s voice and feeling the fire hot on my belly. Heat through the floor. Like I’m an ant crawling across an oven element on high. Toward the door to the hall.
My hand gripping Liz’s ankle.
She showed me the claw marks I’d left with a lift of her pant leg in the airport. Anyone watching might have thought she was showing off a new pair of shoes. But she was wearing orange crocks—bought to replace the ones that nearly melted to her feet as we ran across the roof of the building—her ankle gashed red and shiny with salve in the airport. That was our good-bye hug. My saviour showing me her wounds and me turning my back on Toronto and our life together as friends—near surrogate sisters—flying as far away East as health insurance would allow.
A beautiful St. John’s summer but now it’s November in Newfoundland. Rain or fog every day so that often I don’t even feel like leaving the apartment on Merrymeeting that I share with Gerry, an English Lit student from the university and Lisette, a nineteen year-old girl from Bonavista who wants to make a career out of waitressing.
In warmer weather the three of us sit out on the sidewalk in front of our place and talk—Lisette chain smoking and Gerry and I drinking most of the wine. Gerry’s a writer, he tells me, but he can’t get a damn thing published.
Not like that friggin Ken Harvey, he says, what’s he on? Book ten or fifteen now? And some of us can’t get a short in the Arts and Letters competition.
I pass my time at the university, surfing the web on the library’s wireless, using Lisette’s laptop when she’s at work or at home sleeping. I often go back to the website of the photography school in Toronto I dropped out of after the fire. I’d photographed fire obsessively before that. Setting my camera on a tripod in front of a trashcan blaze I’d built up in an alleyway, setting the shutter for one, five, and fifteen minute exposures. Occasionally I’d walk past the open lens between the tripod and the burning trash and smashed skids sparking up six feet behind me—my presence a shadow smear. I’d wait for the click and then reset the camera to capture quick the red-lit infernal alley. And my long shadow ghosting all the way to the darkened street. The lamppost light, a lone phosphorescent moon.
I remember all the photos I took during my time in Toronto with Liz. All my friends at the school were into portraits or washed-out cityscapes. There was a lot of talk of essence, peeling away facades, deconstructing the flashy visual utopias of downtown advertizing. But I wanted to paint with my camera. I hated focus. I adored movement, obscurity, ghosts, flames.
Perhaps it was my Pentecostal upbringing being brought up subconsciously in searches for unlikely altars across the city, on side streets and in forgotten spaces where weeds pushed up through cracked asphalt.
Arsonist, Liz called me coyly, her lipstick stain still visible on my glass of red wine. Just a taste, she’d said, before going to the fridge for a Steam Whistle pilsner. You’re going to burn down the whole city block by block making your art, aren’t you, Natalie? Every cushion and pillow we owned on the floor between our milk crate coffee table and ratty green couch. A fat, three-wick candle on the crates. The candles were always my idea. The cushions on the floor, Liz’s. And we’d talk. Long hours into the night. Sirens on Spadina nearby intermittent in the dark like distant cries. We’d talk sometimes until the skyline out our window would begin to glow. The sun blood red on the horizon and the wind hot on days calling for thunder storms.
As much as I loved fire and clear night skies purple with city lights, I hated—hate—rain. Rain’s only redeeming feature in Toronto was thunder and lighting. There is little thunder here on the edge of the north Atlantic and next to no lightning. It frightens people here when it does come. Sends them indoors. But it makes me remember that day as a girl in that faraway field next to the crabapple tree up from Lemming’s Lake when the wind went dirty and bent the old trees’ branches in my direction, even as I felt my skin tingle and I reached up to feel my long hair all standing on end—just before lighting struck a hydro pole across the field by West Coon Lake Road. And then the deluge. Something that hasn’t really stopped since September passed in St. John’s, some five months after I moved here with little else other than my camera and a backpack of clothes bought at Value Village.
People gave so much after the blaze. Church groups and charities and old women living in apartments nearby. But nothing given us was what we would ever wear. Old feather boas, neon green tank tops, a paint-stained hoody, three pairs of enormous granny panties. It was like a disaster was a good chance to empty the closet of all the old junk and give it to someone who now had nothing because, well, something is always better than nothing, and, beggars can’t be choosers. And of course, we were beggars. Everything was gone. My computer, my cameras, my journals and books—even my portable hard-drive that I had bought to back up everything on my computer in case my Toshiba laptop was ever stolen or lost. In place of $6000 worth of computer and camera equipment I got a hand-knit woolen sweater that smelled of mothballs and old man from a woman that said it kept her husband warm even on his deathbed, so it should keep me warm as well.
Thanks, I said as I balled it up in my arms, knowing by the feel of it that I’d never be able to wear it without breaking out in a rash. I kept it though. It was in the bottom of my backpack when I landed in St. John’s. I pinned it to my bedroom wall as soon as I found a place through Kijiji. A memento. A woolen icon of absence. Lisette asked if I’d bought it in one of the downtown shops as a souvenir. Said I should’ve asked her first cause she’s got a Nan who knits and would give her a sweater for free instead of paying a hundred bucks on Water Street. Then I told her the story and she kept saying My Love, My Love with her hand over her mouth and her eyes watering up. She called herself a sook and me a poor thing and then she said: So that old lady gave you the sweater her husband died in? Sent his ghost along too to give you back rubs, I’ll bet.
I laughed. The sound shocking. Like a crow’s sudden caw catching in my throat. And I kept laughing. I laughed a lot with Lisette after that, her telling me stories of her family up on the Bonavista. Like how her Pop went to cut firewood in the bush one winter’s day and ended up chopping off his two middle fingers, and how the priest was more concerned with burying the severed fingers in consecrated ground than in getting her Pop to a doctor.
Lisette’s favourite stories were from before Resettlement, when light smoked and guttered and electricity hummed only in rumour.
Gerry’s family had always been Townies so they never experienced Resettlement but through old photographs of full houses being floated around headlands and across the water to new modernized towns.
And now we sells the pictures to the f-ing tourists who loves our bleedin heart history, Gerry said one night in his thickest mock accent.
I didn’t want to tell him that I had bought one of those pictures my first week here. I was going to hang it on the wall beside my dead man’s sweater, but because I didn’t have a nail I didn’t. By the time I’d gotten a nail and hammer I’d also heard Gerry’s opinions on what should be done to the stupid tourists who think they can buy such a simple picture and carry a nation’s grievance in their back pocket. And Newfoundland was certainly a nation still to him.
So I hid the photo I’d bought at Piper’s but would pull it out at nights after I’d downed a tetra pack of wine to myself and sat out with Lisette on the stoop as she chain smoked and told me stories to make me laugh and forget. But each time I pulled out the picture of Mr. Malcolm Roger’s house being towed across the water behind a Rodney loaded with cut poles used to roll the house along the shore—each time I held that image in my hand of three children, a boy flanked on either side by two girls, looking out to the salt box house sitting square on the water, I thought of pulling my life from before the fire with me in my dreams to this new place older than the rest of Canada. Mr. Malcolm Roger’s move from Silver Fox Island to Dover, Bonavista Bay became a mirror and a way for me to think of my move here away from Toronto and that night I lost my sense of smell and my best friend.
Liz tried to hold me that day after the fire, after we’d watched the tenement building burn for seven hours. But I wouldn’t let her. She was strange to me. Like those memories of the night before and us reaching down through the bars of the fire escape to grab the little hands of infants and children ferried up to us from frantic parents below whose own bare feet were sizzling on the hot iron—the fire mere feet from them through the broken windows of that floor below us. We passed along children like bags of sand until our shoes began to melt and the people below us stopped trying to scramble up the burning fire escape because they couldn’t go down for the flames. And they started jumping ten stories to save themselves. Funny that I remember the sound of cracking bones over the roar of the fire a few feet below me. And I remember running across our rooftop chasing after Liz and almost faltering as she jumped the six feet to the next building and I came flailing after. I know we must’ve passed through the smoke-filled hall but I don’t remember it. I only recall Liz’s ankle and my fingernails digging into her flesh as she pulled me along to another apartment where we knocked out a window and crawled out onto the fire-escape.
That’s all I have. And Liz trying to hold me after seven hours watching the building collapse and hearing reports around me that twenty three people were unaccounted for. One woman unhinged and screaming in Cantonese, wailing for someone lost in the fire perhaps. Her mother or father or her child gone back into the blaze for a toy. I try not to speculate. I try not to fill my memories with stories.
But I can’t help doing so. I remember three children, a boy flanked on either side by two girls, staring across the street at the inferno. Watching for their home to come to them out of the burning deep. Not knowing that only blackened steel beams will remain by 8 a.m. when they finally douse the fire.
It seems unreal, the fire, even now, even after replaying it over and over in my head, trying to separate it from my ten thousand lost photos of fire and furious light. But I can’t. I can’t even remember if I pulled away from Liz or if she pushed me away because I wouldn’t let her console me. I wandered or maybe it is that I am wandering now in my deep subconscious so like the subway system under Spadina where I wandered and wander still—looking out into grey fog, smoke, speeding grey trains and swirling mist—unsure of where I am save that I’m on a concrete platform looking out to sea for Mr. Malcolm Roger’s boat to slip into view.
There are people in the fog and they have ash on their foreheads and that’s when I reach my hand to my long hair now cut short and feel the ash and wonder why why why can’t I smell it? Were all these people in the fire or are these their ghosts? There’s a flicker, a witchlight on the water, the flash of a television screen above the crowd on the metro platform, and there are images of my apartment building in flames, and I think it strange to see my nightmare played out on TV, and then I’m onscreen talking to me, looking out at myself, a City News microphone resting on my chin as I recount catatonically what happened and all the while people with ash on their heads, smeared across their brows, are streaming past and I lose sight of myself but hear a voice saying an old tenement building near China Town, Toronto burned to the ground this morning even as thousands walk the street marked with the sign of the cross on this Ash Wednesday.
I turn and head home out it, thankful for a place where the language and stories somehow cradle my memories in a way that I would not let Liz cradle me on that Wednesday last winter. I’m afraid to speak as I’m fearful to take up my camera again, the one thing I was able to buy with the money that a few people were smart enough to give me instead of their hand-me-down griefs. For this is not my home and Gerry inadvertently reminds me of this every time he rants of mainlanders and of those who come from away because they want to live in a dream world—shot in sepia tones—of men in so’westers and rubber boots and women always looking out to sea. And he’s right. I am a CFA, a Come From Away, and I do want that world.
Not so that I can hold it in my back pocket in place of the ten dollars I paid for that photograph taken in the sixties on a beach in Bonavista Bay. Not so that I can own the image and claim to know the history. But so that I can sink into the image and let it creep into those empty crevices where there are no memories of what happened nearly a year ago. Let it fill my emptiness with fog: that scentless ocean smoke rolling off ships burned and sunk offshore here for hundreds of years.
I walk the trail up from Quidi Vidi past Cuckhold’s Cove halfway up Signal Hill and down past the Bookery and Sweet Relic to the road that leads past the Dominion that Gerry tells me used to be a hockey arena. I take the Concourse trails from there to Bonaventure and then up the hill to Merrymeeting and home. It is home, I guess. Lisette’s there and makes me a cup of tea when I walk wet through the door. Out for a walk on this fine day, she says smiling. And I say yes and we drink our tea on cushions pulled from the couch. Gerry walks through the room and says we’d better put those back when we’re done cause he won’t live in a pig sty.
Too late, You Townie, Lisette calls after him. You live in St. John’s remember, where we still flush our shit into the harbour!
And we laugh, blowing the steam off our mugs.
Later, after Lisette’s gone to work downtown and Gerry’s curled up on the couch with Ken Harvey’s new novel, I slip into my room and pull out that photo from under the bed. I lay it out on my rumpled sheets and I take the lens cap off my camera. Then I zoom in till the camera swallows the picture’s frame and all I see is a boat pulling a house over the water like in my memories of standing on that shore with the sound of trains gone in the stillness ebbed only by my breath slipping out of me. This is how I remember it.
Click.
Samuel Thomas Martin is the author of This Ramshackle Tabernacle (Breakwater, 2010). He is a graduate of University of Toronto’s MA in Creative Writing program, where he worked with David Adams Richards.
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